All sorts of writing tips and hacks pop up on the feed of my professional Instagram, most of which fall into one of three categories (or may, in fact, have some overlap between categories):
A) common sense;
B) borrowed without credit from better thought-out books on writing, or;
C) nothing to do with serious writing at all, and everything to do with the vanity of people who like to style themselves as literary influencers but who may well be functionally illiterate.
However…
Sometimes I see things which I really do like, and which give me a new insight into how readers — or applied more widely, audiences — navigate the stories they encounter. This post from firstdraftschool appeared on my feed recently:
The brain likes to be MOSTLY right, then a little wrong (about what happens next, twists, murder suspects, motives).
If it’s right too often → boredom.
If it’s wrong too often → overwhelm.
Pacing lives in the sweet spot: expected… then slightly subverted.
The more I think about it, the more shrewd an observation I think this is. The more I think about it in relation to my favourite makers, the more I see this sweet spot being located time and again in their work with subtlety and precision.
The film director Denis Villeneuve is a great case in point; I say this having just watched Blade Runner 2049 for the very first time, which does an exceptional job of drawing the audience through its central mystery for just shy of 2 hours and 45 minutes, springing some huge emotional surprises considering it’s ostensibly about robots.
I rewatched Dune – Part One and Part Two back-to-back on a wet Sunday last month, and having read (and struggled with) Frank Herbert’s source novel at the start of this year, I’m more appreciative now of the way Villeneuve and his co-writers Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth have wrestled the sprawling book into a satisfying shape. Not so many emotional surprises here, I don’t think, but the fact that there’s any emotion at all is a minor miracle compared to how sterile I found the book’s hokey mysticism to be.
I also really love Arrival, despite it veering a bit too far into overwhelm territory by giving me plenty for my brain to get wrong. Rewatching Arrival and knowing how things will turn out at the end — I use that phrase with unintended irony — doesn’t diminish the film’s pleasure or impact; it sends me off in a different direction, causes it to resonate with me on a different emotional frequency. Again, some huge emotional surprises for something that’s ostensibly about aliens and linguistics.
Interestingly, I have never yet met a woman who had a good word to say about Arrival, for reasons that I can only speculate on; if any female Substackers want to tell me why they don’t, or indeed do, like this film, I’d love to hear from them!
All this has got me thinking about my post from February 2025, On my Golden Apples Theory TM, where I talked about my belief that audiences are always locked in a race with whatever they encounter. Maybe I should coin a phrase for the spirit of what firstdraftschool has described above…
It’s probably obvious what it should be.
If we’re talking about an experience that means we’re not bored and we’re not overwhelmed, but we’re in that sweet spot where expectation melts into subversion, where the right/wrong feelings are juuuuuuust right… Well… We’ve landed on the Goldilocks Theory of Storytelling TM, I reckon, haven’t we?
